The exact opposite of Gilmour’s point is true: good teaching requires
empathy — an effort to understand things, ideas, and people totally
unlike you. Some of those people are your students. Some of those things
are of the past. Some of those ideas are the ideas of authors from
different cultures than yours, and yes, shockingly, even of a different
gender. Engaging with those people, things, and ideas is not just what
research means, and why research is necessary, it’s what reading is.
Gilmour’s account of his teaching, by contrast, is strikingly devoid
of empathy. Chinese authors? Can’t love them. Queer authors? Can’t love
them. (But Marcel….) Female authors? Can’t love them. White men who are
like me or who I want to be? Love those. Sympathy is what this view of
things is all about: one big group hug among guys across the twentieth
century, all guys like Gilmour. What’s genuinely hilarious, rather than
merely depressing, is the predictable homophobia that goes hand in hand
with this chest-thumpy, circle-jerky, narcissistic literary
self-love-fest: Gilmour loves Chekhov so much, he’d marry him tomorrow
if only they weren’t both so amazingly straight. Though “literary” seems
almost incidental. None of what makes Chekhov a cool guy, after all,
has anything to do with the plays or short stories he wrote. It’s all
about his “personality.” His grace. His generosity. And his “bellicose
laugh.”
....Most crucially, David Gilmour doesn’t seem to grasp why anyone should
read literature at all. We can argue about whether Hamlet is right or
not when he claims that art holds a mirror up to nature. But let’s just
say he is. Here’s what Hamlet doesn’t say: that art is a mirror you
choose to pick up to see yourself. Art shows you a mirror. That thing
you see in there isn’t supposed to be your pre-conceived self-image.
It’s something strange, and alien, and scary, or ridiculous, or dull.
But it’s something that demands engagement. And sometimes, it becomes
something that you realize is in fact you — but that’s not meant to be a
happy realization. If the thing you see when you look into a book looks
exactly like what you think you look like, you’re doing it wrong.
- The Loneliness of the Old White Male